Thanks for the occasional emails sent out to myself and other supporters over your name.

I am a New Deal Democrat born in Detroit 1942. I say to my friends that I was a Democrat for forty-five years before I became an African American, although few people appreciate my humor.

You have correctly offered specific, detailed, and valid responses to Rep. Paul Ryan’s ill-conceived proposals to privatize Medicare and other aspects of the social safety net. You have appropriately, if not forcefully, advocated necessary tax increases. You appropriately target the wealthy, but everyone knows that middle-class people must also share the burden of tax increases. When I say middle-class, I mean families with incomes over $80,000, for whom MODESTLY progressive taxes are unfortunately necessary. I don’t think working-class families with combined incomes under $50,000 should be burdened with additional taxes.

The age for receiving social security benefits must continue to rise in accord with increasing life-expectancy, although health concerns must be taken into consideration. It is difficult to justify payment of lightly-taxed social security benefits to persons with incomes over $300,000 and liquifiable assets over $3,000,000.

The government must invent a more efficient and productive way of putting social security funds to work, without risking them in the world of speculation. Social Security funds should never be subject to inflationary policies of the Fed, or the threat of a treasury default planned by the enemies of Social Security.

I encourage you to take a stronger stand in favor of minimum wages and the right to collective bargaining.

As a Roosevelt Democrat, I strongly support military spending, but I believe there are areas of waste in our military budget.

I am disappointed with your health care plan. You should have thrown a “Hail Mary” pass, and not worried about having it batted down. Your short-pass has been intercepted and may well be run-back for a touchdown.

Our illegal alien problem is caused by hypocritical, church-going Republicans, who brought Mexicans here under horrid conditions and at wages below the legal minimum, without social security and other benefits. We cannot, and should not, pack millions of exploited workers into boxcars and dump them somewhere in the Mexican Desert. Many of these Mexican Americans are citizens born here in the U.S., but lacking official birth certificates, because they were not delivered in hospitals. We must develop just means of conferring permanent residency, and, where appropriate, citizenship.

I hope you will speak out against the abandonment and disfranchisement of citizens of Detroit and other Michigan cities. I believe the tragedy of Detroit is equally shocking as the tragedy of New Orleans. Much of the spite directed at Michigan cities is thinly veiled racism.

I disassociate myself from mindless criticisms of you that have come from some opportunist black chauvinists and insincere public intellectuals in the black community.

University education must become once again affordable. A university student should never work more than 12 hours per week at minimum wage. A working class mother should be able to afford to pay for her son’s or daughter’s university tuition without taking a second job. Two semester’s tuition at a state university should not cost more than two weeks take-home pay for a bus-driver, garbage man, cleaning woman, or librarian.

Governments have no business issuing marriage licenses to anybody, straight or gay. Religious people have the freedom to validate their marriages in their churches. Others have the right to formalize marriage contracts in whatever way they see fit.

I associate myself with your friendliest critics, black and white alike. I appreciate and encourage all expressions of your fidelity to the best traditions of the Democratic Party, which, for all its severe historic flaws, is nonetheless the traditional party of the WORKING CLASS. I also encourage you to remind the public of forgotten progressive traditions of the Republican party, which once abolished slavery, protected consumers, regulated monopolies, and recognized the legitimate role of big government in restraining the greed of big business.

Time senior correspondent Michael Grunwald tells the secret history of the stimulus bill, the purest distillation of Change We Can Believe In, a microcosm of Obamas policy successes and political failures. Though it is reviled by the right and rejected by the left, it really is a new New Deal, larger than FDRs and just as transformative. It prevented an imminent depression, while jump-starting Obamas long-term agenda. The stimulus is pouring $90 billion into clean energy, reinventing the way America is powered and fueled; it includes unprecedented investments in renewables, efficiency, electric cars, a smarter grid, cleaner coal, and more. Its carrying health care into the digital era. Its Race to the Top initiative may be the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It produced the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, a broadband initiative reminiscent of rural electrification, and an overhaul of the New Deals unemployment insurance system. Its revamping the way government addresses homelessness, fixes infrastructure, and spends money.

Grunwald reveals how Republicans have obscured these achievements through obstruction and distortion. The stimulus launched a genuine national comeback. It also saved millions of jobs, while creating legacies that could rival the Hoover Dam: the worlds largest wind farm, a new U.S. battery industry, a new high-speed rail network, the worlds highest-speed Internet network. Its main legacy, like the New Deals, will be change.

Years in the making-the definitive biography of the legendary black activist. Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins’ bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world.

Manning Marable’s new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties.

Reaching into Malcolm’s troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents’ activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination. Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of the most singular forces for social change, capturing with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.

If the nations gross national incomeover $14 trillionwere divided evenly across the entire U.S. population, every household could call itself middle class. Yet the income-level disparity in this country is now wider than at any point since the Great Depression. In 2010 the average salary for CEOs on the S&P 500 was over $1 millionclimbing to over $11 million when all forms of compensation are accounted forwhile the current median household income for African Americans is just over $32,000. How can some be so rich, while others are so poor? In this provocative book, Peter Edelman, a former top aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and a lifelong antipoverty advocate, offers an informed analysis of how this country can be so wealthy yet have a steadily growing number of unemployed and working poor. According to Edelman, we have taken important positive steps without which 25 to 30 million more people would be poor, but poverty fluctuates with the business cycle.

The structure of todays economy has stultified wage growth for half of Americas workerswith even worse results at the bottom and for people of colorwhile bestowing billions on those at the top. So Rich, So Poor delves into what is happening to the people behind the statistics and takes a particular look at the continuing crisis of young people of color, whose possibility of a productive life too often is lost on their way to adulthood.

The Civil Rights Movement gave rise to the protest culture we know today, and the experiences of leaders like Congressman Lewis have never been more relevant. Now, more than ever, this nation needs a strong and moral voice to guide an engaged population through visionary change. Congressman John Lewis was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end segregation. Despite more than forty arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. He is the author of his autobiography, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of a Movement, and is the recipient of numerous awards from national and international institutions, including the Lincoln Medal; the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Lifetime Achievement Award (the only one of its kind ever awarded); the NAACP Spingarn Medal; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, among many others.